Hillary Clinton recently gave a long speech attacking Trump on many things. In it, she retreated from her recent feint against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and attacked Trump for “protectionism,” so it seems the divide between them on the issue remains clear.

Here are the key excerpts from Trump’s speech:

“America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997 - even as the country has increased its population by 50 million people.

At the center of this catastrophe are two trade deals pushed by Bill and Hillary Clinton:

First, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Second, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

NAFTA was the worst trade deal in history, and China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization has enabled the greatest jobs theft in history.

It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA in 1993, and Hillary Clinton who supported it.

It was also Bill Clinton who lobbied for China’s disastrous entry into the World Trade Organization, and Hillary Clinton who backed that terrible agreement.

Then, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton stood by idly while China cheated on its currency, added another trillion dollars to our trade deficits, and stole hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property...

It was also Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, who shoved us into a job-killing deal with South Korea in 2012.

As reported by the Economic Policy Institute in May, this deal doubled our trade deficit with South Korea and destroyed nearly 100,000 American jobs.

As Bernie Sanders said, Hillary Clinton ‘Voted for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs.’ “

·It would give up all of our economic leverage to an international commission that would put the interests of foreign countries above our own.

·It would further open our markets to aggressive currency cheaters. It would make it easier for our trading competitors to ship cheap subsidized goods into U.S. markets - while allowing foreign countries to continue putting barriers in front of our exports.

·The TPP would lower tariffs on foreign cars, while leaving in place the foreign practices that keep American cars from being sold overseas. The TPP even created a backdoor for China to supply car parts for automobiles made in Mexico.

·The agreement would also force American workers to compete directly against workers from Vietnam, one of the lowest wage countries on Earth.

·Not only will the TPP undermine our economy, but it will undermine our independence.

·The TPP creates a new international commission that makes decisions the American people can’t veto.

·These commissions are great Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street funders who can spend vast amounts of money to influence the outcomes.

·It should be no surprise then that Hillary Clinton, according to Bloomberg, took a ‘leading part in drafting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.’

·She praised or pushed the TPP on 45 separate occasions, and even called it the ‘gold standard.’

·Hillary Clinton was totally for the TPP just a short while ago, but when she saw my stance, which is totally against, she was shamed into saying she would be against it too - but have no doubt, she will immediately approve it if it is put before her, guaranteed.”

Here’s Trump’s actual specific agenda on trade:

“Here are seven steps I would pursue right away to bring back our jobs:

One: I am going to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has not yet been ratified.

Two: I’m going to appoint the toughest and smartest trade negotiators to fight on behalf of American workers.

Three: I’m going to direct the Secretary of Commerce to identify every violation of trade agreements a foreign country is currently using to harm our workers. I will then direct all appropriate agencies to use every tool under American and international law to end these abuses.

Four: I’m going tell our NAFTA partners that I intend to immediately renegotiate the terms of that agreement to get a better deal for our workers. And I don’t mean just a little bit better, I mean a lot better. If they do not agree to a renegotiation, then I will submit notice under Article 2205 of the NAFTA agreement that America intends to withdraw from the deal.

Five: I am going to instruct my Treasury Secretary to label China a currency manipulator. Any country that devalues their currency in order to take advantage of the United States will be met with sharply

Six: I am going to instruct the U.S. Trade Representative to bring trade cases against China, both in this country and at the WTO. China’s unfair subsidy behavior is prohibited by the terms of its entrance to the WTO, and I intend to enforce those rules.

Seven: If China does not stop its illegal activities, including its theft of American trade secrets, I will use every lawful presidential power to remedy trade disputes, including the application of tariffs consistent with Section 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.”

The above agenda is not crazy. It is, in fact, fairly standard trade-hawk stuff, and would be different from previous trade hawks only in that Trump appears set to actually do all these things, rather than just talk about them. These are all solid, meaningful actions, which have been discussed in knowledgeable circles for years, not impulsive daydreams: the man has been doing his homework. They are all all designed to happen within existing law: even his mention of withdrawing from NAFTA carefully reminds everyone that the treaty itself contains a withdrawal provision. There’s no wild talk of kicking over the existing global trading system by storming out of the WTO. He understands that chaos wouldn’t be good for our economy.

That being said, there’s the obvious hint that a President Trump could hypothetically up the ante if our trading partners don’t fall into line. For one thing, America can hypothetically withdraw from the WTO, just like from NAFTA, and Trump doesn’t have to make that threat openly for it to be tacitly there. For another, the Section 201, 301, and 232 tariffs Trump mentions aren’t quantitatively limited: they could, if things really got nasty, be big tariffs on major industries. So the message seems to be

“I’m serious about trade reform, serious about not screwing it up, and I’m willing to play nice if other nations are. But if they’re not, I’ll escalate to whatever it takes to get this done.”

Would this agenda actually solve America’s trade crisis? Well, obviously the above steps are all ultimately quantitative in effect, so it would depend on how far they were pursued, but yes, these are the right measures to do the job. They’re not the only possible measures - trade can be manipulated by a lot of different levers - but they’re valid. This is not window dressing.

How far a hypothetical Trump administration would push, in a environment where Trump won’t be king, merely a president subject to any number of political constraints from Congress on down, cannot be predicted outright. But it’s obvious that a) this is one of his big priorities, on which he would spend serious political capital, and b) this agenda would be popular with the public, so Congress will feel a lot of pressure to go along.

How America’s trading partners would react, is even less predictable. My own guess is that they’ll recognize that the days of Uncle Sam playing Uncle Sucker are over, and strive to maintain as much stability in the global trading system as they can in a world in which the days of racking up huge surpluses against the U.S. are gone for good.

They know they can’t stop a truly determined United States from forcing its trade back into balance, they know an endless American deficit can’t go on forever anyway, and they know that causing chaos by kicking up a futile fuss will be very expensive for them.

All in all, this is a winning proposal on trade.

Note: For readers new to my column, I am not a Trump supporter per se. Here’swhere I said nice things about polar opposite Bernie Sanders. If Hillary Clinton hada rational trade policy, I would praise it.

Scale-invariant refers to a dynamic that functions equally well on the micro-level as it does on the macro-level. (The scientific definition is:"scale invariance is a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables, are multiplied by a common factor.")

Accounting is scale-invariant. If a household has fewer assets than liabilities, it is insolvent. If a $10 billion company has fewer assets than liabilities, it is insolvent.

Human emotions also have scale-invariant features, as we all share the same wetware / genetic heritage / naturally selected default settings and capabilities.

The notion that the ideal solution to a problem is to hide it by ignoring it and refusing to discuss it is scale-invariant. "The elephant in the room" in a marriage is a problem that one or both partners fear might blow up the relationship, and neither is willing to take that risk.

In a corporation (for example, in Nokia before it collapsed), mid-level managers hide problems for fear of being fired or demoted.

In national governments and central banks, major financial/ economic problems are glossed over with soothing public relations and rigged statistics.

We all know this "solution" (hiding a problem and refusing to acknowledge it directly) eventually blows up the relationship, the corporation or the national economy.

Dishonesty wasn't really a solution, it was simply easier:directly acknowledging a serious problem is difficult for many reasons. Nobody likes to acknowledge failure and/or powerlessness, and nobody likes to sacrifice or ask others to sacrifice.

So we ignore the problem, gloss it over, mask it, and refuse to honestly confront the unwelcome realities.

Kyle Bass has consistently maintained that China's ballooning debt has reached the point that the government, despite its claims to the contrary, can no longer control the inevitable implosion of China's $3 trillion in corporate debt and trillions in other private-sector debt.

In comparing the asset-liability mismatch that triggered the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008 with China's current mismatch, Bass said:

"...our asset-liability mismatches were two and a half percent of our system, and you know what they did. So China's excesses (at 10% of their system) are already, they're already so far ahead of the world's excesses in prior crises that we're facing the largest macro imbalance in world history. And to this day, I can't figure out why people don't see it for what it is."

If we can't be honest, no solution is possible.

Many of us declared the official response to the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09 nothing but smoke and mirrors and extend and pretend.

Interestingly, after seven years of weak growth and rising wealth/income inequality,the mainstream media is finally discussing the reality that the official "fixes" of quantitative easing (QE) and zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) have not been solutions at all: they've only exacerbated imbalances and inequalities that have grown in size and severity.

Putting off the day of reckoning is not a real solution. Solutions require honesty, and currently that honesty is too painful to bear.

So instead of getting an opportunity to think through a long-term solution, we'll get another meltdown (this time in China) and the authorities will choose politically expedient "extend and pretend" fixes that only make the underlying imbalances and instabilities worse.

Denial is not a solution, and neither is acting like the problem doesn't exist. But this is our short-term default setting in all scales of human life.

There is a high price to be paid for not solving problems, just as there is a great dividend for those few who have learned to tackle problems head-on in a brutally honest fashion

The study showed that the percentage of low-wage earners grew across all levels of education but increased at a higher rate among the most educated.

There was a 60-per-cent increase in low-wage incidence among employees with a MA or PhD from 1997 to 2014. Meanwhile, over the same period, there was a 20-per-cent increase among low-wage workers with a bachelor’s degree, according to the study.

Employees with little education or some high school still represent the largest proportion of people who fall in the low-income group. (Of the workers with zero to eight years of education, 50.7 per cent were low-income earners in 2014 compared with 44.6 per cent in the late 1990s.) But what is surprising is the percentage growth among employees with top degrees.

“Increased educational attainment should be lowering the incidence of low wages over time. This, however, is not showing up in the actual incidence of low wages,” said the study authored by Jasmin Thomas, an economist. “This suggests that the demand for well-paying jobs has outpaced the supply.”

The survey looked at all employees between the age of 20 and 64. It classified a low-income earner as someone who earned less than two-thirds of the median hourly wage for full-time workers.

The study also found that the prevalence of low-income earners was the highest in the accommodation and food-services sector, followed by retail trade and agriculture

Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.

And it’s not just the British who are suffering. That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.

Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could.

During my campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, I’ve visited 46 states. What I saw and heard on too many occasions were painful realities that the political and media establishment fail even to recognize.

In the last 15 years, nearly 60,000 factories in this country have closed, and more than 4.8 million well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Much of this is related to disastrous trade agreements that encourage corporations to move to low-wage countries.

Despite major increases in productivity, the median male worker in America today is making $726 dollars less than he did in 1973, while the median female worker is making $1,154 less than she did in 2007, after adjusting for inflation.

Nearly 47 million Americans live in poverty. An estimated 28million have no health insurance, while many others are underinsured. Millions of people are struggling with outrageous levels of student debt. For perhaps the first time in modern history, our younger generation will probably have a lower standard of living than their parents.Frighteningly, millions of poorly educated Americans will have a shorter life span than the previous generation as they succumb to despair, drugs and alcohol.

Meanwhile, in our country the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Fifty-eight percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. Wall Street and billionaires, through their “super PACs,” are able to buy elections.

On my campaign, I’ve talked to workers unable to make it on $8 or $9 an hour; retirees struggling to purchase the medicine they need on $9,000 a year of Social Security; young people unable to afford college. I also visited the American citizens of Puerto Rico, where some 58 percent of the children live in poverty and only a little more than 40 percent of the adult population has a job or is seeking one.

Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change.

But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign’s rhetoric — and is central to Donald J. Trump’s message.

We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade.Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels.

We need international efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness and ignorance.

The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States. Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.

In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.